smokeybrandcompositions

[smokeybrandcompositions]

Gecko

I live in California where our governor decided to hike the minimum wage for fast food workers from the statewide sixteen dollars an hour, to twenty. There are stipulations which need to be met, of course, the biggest of which is a chain would need more than sixty locations nationwide to qualify for this hike. That means, for the most part, only the nigger restaurants were hit with this increase. I’[m talking your McDonalds and your Jack in the Boxes, joints like that. Applebees and Dennys got a past because they aren’t considered fast foot, even though they are all supplied by a Sysco truck. Now, I’m not here to condemn California for making this move. To be perfectly honest, I think it doesn’t go far enough. This wage increase is only for a specific section of the overall workforce. Most people still make the sixteen an hour wage. I think that twenty should be available to everyone, not just burger-flippers but, at the same time, it’s not their fault that legislation has been hobbled politically for almost a decade. My personal beef aside, I’ve been seeing a TON of vitriol for these workers finally getting enough money in their check to pay bills AND buy groceries in the same pay period, because forty of their chicken nuggies cost twenty-six dollars. That sh*t boggles my mind, man.

Seriously, you’re mad these legitimate food service workers are making a decent wage, just because you’re fetid baboon butt cheek burgers are costing more than you want? Someone showed me a price grab of a McDonald’s Big Mac meal costing something like eighteen dollars and the outrage was palpable. You’re telling me the value of that food you want isn’t worth eighteen dollars, and you’re right. That sh*t is trash in every way possible. The aforementioned chicken nuggets aren’t even made of real meat. They’re made from chicken slurry, which is exactly what that sh*t sounds like. No fast food is worth the money you pay for it, and you should absolutely feel some kind of way about it, but that ire is misdirected at the sixteen year old trying to save money for prom, that twenty-two year old working their way through college, or that single mother just trying to make ends meet. You should be mad at the major corporations passing on that way overdue pay increase to you, when their CEOs are making millions a year. I mean, there is a certain societal stigma when it comes to fast food worker, I literally just referred to them as burger flippers, which sees that profession as less than.

We have been conditioned to believe that these fry cooked don’t deserve money to live, because they work a fryer and not a backhoe. I’ve worked at a McDonalds before. I know what goes into that sh*t. I lasted a day. Too much work, too little pay. I, personally, feel like they still don’t make enough with how many hats those cats have to wear, but this new wage is a strong step in the right direction. Those cats, the people on the ground serving you, more than earn that twenty an hour and then some. You know who doesn’t deserve their salaries? Corporate. Corporate doesn’t deserve that loot and they’re the reason your QPC is forty-three dollar, not that twenty an hour California is forcing them to pay their workers. McDonald’s made fourteen and half, BILLION dollars last year. Their CEO made nineteen million last year, alone, and eight percent increase year-over-year. At twenty dollars and hour, that roughly translates thirty eight thousand a year. Let’s say that CEO takes half that nineteen, which is still nine million and change in his pocket, and divide that by said newly minted minimum wage and you get three thousand, four hundred and twenty. Let me throw those numeric in there so I can be very clear, that’s 3,420 people HALF the McDonalds’ CEO can fund for a year. Half of that man’s paycheck, could pay the full years’ worth of wages, for 3,420 of his employees. And that’s just the CEO. That’s not the CFO, the COO, or any of the upper executives who are probably making six figures themselves. The reason your Filet-o-Fish is so goddamn expensive, is corporate greed and I can prove it. In-n-Out exists.

I’ve been seeing so many of these articles and sh*t on Right wing sites (the MSN at my job seems to think that I’m some sort of MAGA cultists but whatever), and they’re claiming the In-n-Out CEO is “standing up” to the draconian Gavin Newsom over his egregious, anti-business, wage increase. And, just on a personal note, f*ck yes we should be anti-business! Being anti-business is why monopolies and child labor are “illegal”, the f*ck? Anyway, the thing is, In-n-Out has always been ahead of the curve in regards to their employee pay. Way back when I worked for McDonald’s in the early Aughts, I was making the freshly minted sever and a quarter an hour. Animal Style was giving their guys two dollars more than what I was making back then. Right after the pandemic, there was one close to me shelling out nineteen an hour. They were paying that post-pandemic, when inflation was starting to ramp up crazy (Thanks. Trump), so I know for a fact why weren’t too far off the twenty. And guess how much they increased their menu? A quarter. Twenty-five f*cking cents. Your Double-Double is a whole ass quarter more than it was in March, and that kid pounding out fresh fries in that wall mounted Veg-o-Matic, made from real potatoes, sourced right here in the good ol’ US of A, can make a substantial wage to maybe impress his crush with a little movie date, followed by put-put, with a enough left over for some ice cream. All on a menu increase of actual chump change.

How is that possible, you might ask? The likes of McDonalds, by far the largest fat food conglomerate in the world with billions served. And billions made, can’t do it, but lowly, California based In-n-Out can while serving actual beef and potatoes in their burgers, can? It’s because In-n-Out is privately owned company. It helps, tremendously, that their CEO is only forty-one, my age, and took the big chair at twenty-seven after literally working her way up through the company. Ma is the legit In-n-Out heiress but made the decision to work on the ground to better understand what her workers were going through. That experience informs her decisions and, fifteen years later, she’s able to pay her workers fairly while treating the customer’s pockets with just as much care. There are no shareholders to appease, no buybacks for and stock packages for executives. Sure, she makes millions, but it’s organic in a way that McDs, and a lot of these other places, don’t. I cannot, for the life of me, find anything on what she makes, but most of her top executives only make in the mid hundred thousand. A comfortable six figures, not seven or right. SO I ask you, if In-n-Out can keep their workers happy, rein in executive pay bloat, and still pull in nearly two billion last year, all in California, why the f*ck can’t anyone else do it? In-n-Out is the blueprint. The only difference is the fact that those Corpos are greedy and there isn’t a check to balance them. Just ;like the In-n-Out thing, I got receipts to prove that sh*t.

You see, in Europe, where unions are strong and Labor has proper representation, workers are supported and the wage reflects that. They have contracts which put stipulations in on where, how long, and what age employees can work. There are night shift differential and increased pay for weekends. There is still traditional overtime but most companies try to avoid that as it taxes pockets hard. As it should. They are able to do all of this, while charging prices comparable to what we pay stateside, and no one complains. No one is standing against the work force, demanding cheaper prices for food that legally has to meet a certain nutritional standard that just doesn’t exists here in the States. Places like McDs are basically just like In-n-Out in terms of overall food quality, because the EU makes them be. That’s because there is regulation over yonder. There are unions. There is basically a worker’s bill of right and all corporations must follow them or they face consequences. Just ask Elon about that when he tried to export Sweden over a Tesla plant. Sh*t did not go the way he wanted and no one cared. In fact, the neighboring countries refused to receive the material to build his cars, in their ports, out of solidarity. And their Big Macs are, like, nineteen dollars apiece. They also have universal healthcare, universal day care, can take a month of paid vacation, and drink from the holy grail whenever they feel like it. That last bit is an exaggeration but the other stuff isn’t. It’s wild seeing so many people here, across the country, licking the f*ck out of that corporate boot, advocating for a system that is telling you they do not want you to have enough money to live, that if they must pay that wage, they’ll get it back by charging you a premium for food it costs them pennies on the dollar to provide. Don’t be mad at the worker for finally getting their due, be made at the corporation for making you pay for it.

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Just a Phase

There’s this report going around on Fox News saying that “the youth trans craze is just a phase” and that they “grow out of it around fifteen years old”. Now, that might be true for a lot of kids questioning their sexuality. Right around that age, you start to feel lout who you are. Obviously, there probably about a decade or more of growth to be had, you’re not really a real adult until you’ve a good amount of life out in the wild, removed from the safe bosom on your parents, but fifteen or so is around the age where you kind of develop a base personality unique to yourself. I know, for me, I was around that age when I properly understood my peers are kind of idiots and high school is dumb. Every one of the people I shared classes with, anyone even close to my age, was just like me: a hormone addled, panicky, sexually frustrated, knob, just trying to figure the small sh*t out before I got kicked in the ass by the world at large in just a few short years. I can say with my full chest that doesn’t happen to everyone, but by the time we graduated, most of us were on that same page. I don't doubt that this report from the clown machine over at Fox has some kernels of truth riddled through the acrid feces gallivanting as “news”, but I question just how accurate it is considering the laughably obvious bias from the network. Conservatives hate everything not White, Trad, and Conservative so, obviously, trans people are the new genital boogeymen. First, it was the blacks, then the gays, not the transgenders, almost always because of some ridiculous, archaic, regressive, ideology perpetuated by white Christian supremacy. It’s all stupid, just like this report, but I kind of get it.

Obviously, this “report” is just more of the trans panic conservatives are pushing. It’s a way to incite the oft ignorant, poor, hyper religious, white masses into action. Wait, no, that’s Mexicans. They use Mexicans for that. No, the Trans Panic is to rile up trad wives and white, suburban, mothe4rs; the voting block they lost when they decided to, you know, go full war on uteruses for the past three years. There are a surprising amount of TERFS out in the world and this stupid Trans erasure is proving just how bigoted these middle class white women can be. Like, I’m a giant black dude. That bigotry materializes as fetishization for me. These white women hate me so much, they want to f*ck me to death. True story. But trans women? Man, these fake women are out here, stealing spaces for uteruses, even if their political and spiritual leaders are trying to do the exact same thing. Like, their fine with some strongman telling them to stay barefoot and in the kitchen where you belong, but f*ck Dylan Mulvaney for wearing that dress better than me. Even more poignant is the fact this sh*t is JUST for transwomen. I haven’t heard a peep about transmen! It’s weird that it’s always about controlling female bodies, and never male ones, even if they are trans. Like, no one is worried about trans men out here power lifting or if my sixteen year old daughter decides to change her name to Jim Longdong and grow a beard. That’s fine. But let my son go from Eric to Erica and all of a sudden, the pitchforks come out? Word?

I support trans rights like a mother*cker. I support the rights of anyone trying to be who they are on principal, even if I don’t personally fully understand those decisions. It’s not my place to understand, but to accept them as fellow human beings. You don’t have to like their choices, but you do have to tolerate them. That said, there’s no way I put my kid on hormone blockers before the age of sixteen. None. If my child ever dame out to me, said they feel trapped in their body, I’ll let them live that life in every way except biologically, until I’m comfortable they understand the ramifications of their choice. Don’t misunderstand me, this ain’t a “no”. It would never be a “no”. What it is, is my decades on this earth as a black person, informing me about the cruelty living as an “other” can have on a person. Throw on top of that there are A LOT of randoms out there who will get violent about what may or may not be in your pants, and your life is in wild danger. If my kid tells me at ten years old they feel trans, or gay, or just “different”, I’ll hear them, address their concern and bravery with loving compassion, and then immediately get them a goddamn gun! Figuratively, of course. I’m not arming my child with a real firearm, but I am arming them with the knowledge on how to defend themselves. My child coming out to me will be met with all the love and gentleness what’s left of my heart can muster, and then I’m immediately putting them in martial arts. And, as soon as they are old enough, I’m taking them to the range. Plot twist, I am going to get them a gun when they are old enough because sh*t like this stupid report is perpetuating violence on my theoretical trans child, and I am not here for it!

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Take That

All this sh*t about Diddy is not surprising to me in the slightest. Of course this dude is the way he is, mans has literally gotten away with murder for decades, what’s a rape or two on top of that. Bro has a body count like Riley Reid, in both regards. I’ve never been one to support Diddy. I’ve been one to support Bad Boy artists because they are basically bamboozled into that life but, ever since BIG was killed, I’ve been side-eyeing Puff. Like, how were you not with BIG when he got hit? Why were you in the truck behind your golden goose of an artist, who was leaving you for his own label? Why Mase ain’t go out with y’all that night and opted to stay indoors? Why were you even in LA, knowing how hot it was out there for Bad Boy, specifically? BIG wouldn’t be the last of his affiliate to kick the bucket, too. His entire crew from Uptown Records are either dead or almost died. I think the last two standing are Al B. Sure and Puff, everyone else, including Kim Porter, have been dead for years. All from something like a cardiac arrest or whatever. Kind of like Jamie Foxx, who had a stroke, which can be caused by a cardiac arrest. Interesting that he had tons of tapes from these Puffy Parties and started talking about them out loud, in public, on video, right before he had his Troubles. Suspected homicides aside, Puff is known to be a psychopath. Dangled Wall-E out a window while at the studio. Firebombed Cudi’s car because he made eyes at Cassie. For sure got weird with Usher when he was young. I even read a story about how he took a kettle bell to his son’s coach while kid was at USC, and then made him publicly apologize for making Diddy assault him! Real, next level, Dick Cheney, bullsh*t right there. So it’s weird to me everyone is just honing in on the gay sh*t.

Straight up, full disclosure, I do not think Puff Daddy is gay. I do not think he is bisexual. I think Puff Daddy is into dominating people. I think he f*cks dudes to let them know he is the alpha, that he’s the one in charge. You submit to that Diddy because you don’t have a choice. Sure, there might be an attraction there, but I think it’s more he’s testing to see how far you’re willing to go, how much of yourself you’re willing to sell in order to be famous and sh*t. How many dudes has Diddy pressed and they walked away? Puff pushed up on 50 Cent once. He been talking about that sh*t, out loud, for decades. Ain’t no one coming after Fif at this point. He’ll return fire like it’s not an issue. But he got it like that, though. Mans is a mogul now, just like Puff. Xzibit had a story about a part he went to with Superhead. He said Diddy pulled him to the side and told him women are the devil and them promptly took him to an after party in a club where dudes was f*cking each other on the dance floor. Katt Williams said he had to turn down fifty million dollars, four times, to protect his anal virtue and then immediately named dropped Diddy as one of these sexual deviants in the industry. What do these cats all have in common? They’re self-made men. 50 earned that look from Em by dropping mixtapes. Xzibit came up through the West Coast in the early Aughts. Katt Williams pays for his own tours, he doesn’t give a sh*t about the celebrity. When you don’t care about the “fame”, the Diddys of the world can’t hold you like that. I mean, just the way he treated Cassie, with the trafficking and rapes, is more than enough to show you that Diddy doesn’t give a sh*t about his paramours. He’s in it to exert control, to inflict obedience. Him f*cking Rapper’s in the butt, is primarily so they no he f*cked them in the butt. So they know that he can do it again, if he wants. That’s not gay, that’s abuse, and that should be what everyone is focusing on.

The No Diddy stuff is funny but let’s be real here, Sean Combs is a monster that not only has blood on his hands, but has ruined entire lives and many a career. He has raped, manipulated, blackmailed, and abused countless people during his run as THE last Bad Boy standing. None of this was about his fetishes or sexual gratification, it was all about asserting his power over anyone he deemed less than. He groomed Cassie. Got his claws into her at nineteen years old. Terrorized her for a decade. Mans tried to absolutely own Mase. Manipulated him into endless advances and IOUs. Mase finally bailed, moved to Atlanta, and found god for a while. Listening to him talk about his time at Bad Boy is harrowing as f*ck. There’s been a trail of actual death and destruction in Puff Daddy’s wake for years. He was a major boogie man in the industry but Cassie took a shot at the god and, while it didn’t kill him, it showed the world he can bleed. Now there’s chum in the water and even the Feds want a piece of Diddy. There is no amount of royalties he can withhold, taped full of debauched blackmail, or brand new rap butthole he can f*ck, that is going to shift this power dynamic. The Federal Government is after Sean Combs. He’s about to get f*cked this time around, by the long arm of the law.

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Faithless

Apparently, NBC has hired Ronna McDaniel as a political consultant and her “colleagues” feel some kind of way about it. For those of you who don’t know, Ronna McDaniel was the RNC chair during Trump’s run in the Oval Office, and reigned over it as he tried to basically bamboozle the country into a dictatorship which failed, spectacularly, violently, on January 6th, 2020. This woman was right there, encouraging the fake electorate plot but offering logistics, political cover, and legal aid. There are depositions about this this sh*t. She’s called the people she is not working for and with, the enemy. Fake News. Radical Left Communists. Perverts. Part of the Swamp. Everything Trump has said about the left in the time she was in charge of the RNC and he was in political office, McDaniel signed off on. His words were her words. She was such a sycophant for Drumpf, ma changed her name because her he hated her uncle. For the record, Ronna McDaniel’s given name is Ronna Romney McDaniel. For years, she worked in the political field as Romney. She abandoned her maiden name, the one with all of the political cache tied to it, in order to suck at the teat of a would-be authoritarian, and the president of NBC thought it was a good idea to platform this slime ball in the “fairness” of political discourse. Bro, am I living in bizarre world right now?

I read a piece about some executive say NBC saying that you can’t get a fair view of the issues in an echo, insinuating that having so many of their news people leaning left has skewed the way they present news. Adding McDaniel to the mix was supposed to fix that but really? You already have Conservatives on your payroll, Joe Scarborough immediately comes to mind. He was a f*cking Republican House Representative FOR FLORIDA, back in the late Nineties and Early Aughts. You can’t get much more Conservative than that. The problem here is that the Right has moved away from tempered, reasonable, educated, people they send to office, people like Scarbourough. Don’t misunderstand me, Joe and I will probably disagree on a lot of fundamental political issues, he’s still technically a Conservative and I genuinely believe that sh*t holds out growth as a society back, but at least there’s room for discourse. We can debate each other. We can exchange ideas and come to some sort of agreement. Joe, and his ilk, would listen. Ronna and her band of despotic ass wipes, won’t. I mean, you see that in their own Party as we speak. The Republicans have pass no legislation, other than to oust Speaker after Speaker. They’re f*cking eating each other live on TV and no one on the right seems to care and NBC thought it would be wise to bring in ca principal architect, a direct enabler of such chaos in out government, in order to represent “The Right.” Bro, no. Never

You can’t both sides this sh*t. You can’t give what is effectively the propaganda and bankroll arm of a would-be fascist state, air time. There are no reasonable Republicans anymore. The RNC is just another extension of the Trump Regime and their gearing up to take another shot at Democracy. Ronna McDaniel had a direct hand in guiding those sights. Literally, up until she was officially ousted from her role as the RNC chair, she espoused that the 2020 election was stolen, which is a lie. That claim failed in every court it was brought in to. Fox News was sued, and settled for hundreds of millions of dollars, because there was enough evidence to prove their claim of voter machine tampering was a lie. Ronna perpetuated these falsehoods, in her capacity as arguably the second or third most powerful Republican on the planet, up until the very day she wasn’t, and then after securing that NBC bag, got on television to tell everyone she didn’t believe anything she said for the past six years or whatever. That she as just towing the line, following the Republican current. If that’s the case, then you can be bought. Your integrity has a price. You’re not to be trusted as journalist, but as a media mercenary but one without your main weapon because you’re not the RNC chair anymore. Your Strong Man got you fired so he could install his daughter-in-law. You changed your name for this man and he returned your loyalty by taking your career away from you.

Ronna was painted as the failure of every election a Trump candidate lost, since 2020. It as her poor leadership which lead to seats being lost at every level of Government, at every Special Election across the country. It has nothing to do with the Republican cause basically shifting toward one of straight up White Nationalism. It had nothing to do with every Republican rallying behind Trump, was pushing this xenophobic, misogynistic, message to any voter that would listen. It had nothing to do with all of these ridiculous f*ckers touting their support of Roe getting repealed and the perceived necessity for a nationwide abortion ban. No, these GOP candidates lost, over and over again, because Ronna was bad at her job. According to Trump. And she was sacrificed so that her once beloved orange demagogue would save face, instead of being held accountability with which he infects the entire party. Cast aside and left to the wolves, Ronna did what was best for her, and appealed to the enemy she’d been attacking for half a decade. And they responded in kind, bad faith be damned.

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Without Representation

Yo, this meme i posted about how billionaires don't pay taxes in the US, got flagged on Facebook for false information! I am absolutely beside myself right now. Like, the thing cited an article from The Dispatch (?), a Conservative biased, subscription based, online “newsletter,” stating that Zuck, in fact, only takes home a dollar a year in salary from his position as Facebook Overlord. You can't tax a dollar 's worth of income, bro. He's a billionaire because of his ownership stake in FB, and that's not income. See, that makes sense. Can't get taxed income taxes if that's not income. By the strictest, surface level, interpretation of current tax law, this article is correct. If you're an idiot who refuses to look deeper into any, boot-licking propaganda, this is more than enough for you to stan a Musk. The thing is, I'm not an idiot.

The bourgeoisie do that sh*t on purpose SPECIFICALLY to NOT pay their fair share BECAUSE of what i said above. You can have every bit of your opulence tied up in stocks, and never actually be taxed at your level of wealth, because it, technically, doesn't count toward it. It's not currency or actual money, but potential money. It's f*cking Schrodinger's fortune over here and you can't tax phantom numbers. If they sell some stock, cash it out, then, yeah, they're subject to income tax. They don't do that. They borrow against it. Take out massive loans they'll never pay back but, because those stocks are there, they're good for it. You don't pay taxes on loan money, bro. In fact, in some cases, you get a tax break for them! Another thing these assholes do is trade IN stocks. They exchange those stock for services and goods, but don't have to cash them out. Again, no cash out, no income tax! This sh*t is wild to me. Like, bro, are there people reading this rag and actually BELIEVING this nonsense? Are Conservatives this goddamn stupid? Yes, these robber barons and ultra capitalists don't pay income taxes because they technically don't receive income, but you're telling me the richest man in the world gets a pass on contributing to our society at a properly proportionate rate, because he's got accounts on his payroll who are good at exploiting technicalities?

Like, this isn't me being a "Coastal Liberal Elitist" or whatever. This is me being a smart person, who understand commerce. Any one can seek out federal tax returns from the richest motherf*ckers in the country. They're all saying pittance on the dollar, for their gross ass wealth! Bro, Trump was a billionaire when he got into his troubles and they released his tax records. Sh*t was national news. He hadn't paid a dime in close to two decades and only recently came out of pocket during his tenure as POTUS. During one of those rare, latter day years where he was at the mercy of the IRS, i paid more than he did! And Drumpf had a net worth laughably higher than mine! Bro boasted that he had four hundred million in liquid assets, that means, CASH, during one of his many, many, fraud depositions. Yet, here I am, turning over several times more in year end, government extortion, than he did. Now, his money doesn't necessarily come fro stocks. He grifts hard on real estate. Still, the game is the same. He borrows against those real estate evaluations, the same way someone like Zuck borrows against them FB stocks. Now, if Trump is on record ding that sh*t, the f*ck you think Elon is doing? Bezos? He makes his employees piss in bottles so he can have a super yacht so large, he had forced a country to dismantle a historic bridge so he could cruise it's riviera. A yacht that cost a couple hundred million to build. A yacht he thanked his grossly underpaid, laughably under insured, factory workers for basically trading their serfdom to be be built. Bro, telling me billionaires pay taxes, just because they receive paltry incomes during the year, is bullsh*t and intellectually dishonesty. sh*t is cartoonishly insulting. You f*cking know EXACTLY what we mean when we say these gluttonous leeches on society don't pay taxes.

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Time After Time

It’s wild the editorials you come across on the internet. I just read an entire piece, claiming that Trump supporters see him more as a Democrat than a republican, a throwback to those Clinton-era “Liberals”. This article went on to quote a bunch of numbers about how the slide toward liberalism has been a steep one. For instance, back in 1994, nearly two-thirds of Dems agreed with the statement that 'immigrants are a burden on our country because they take jobs, housing, and health care'. By 2019, only eleven percent of Democrats agreed with it. Another gem counted the seismic shift toward pro-choice. Way back in the year 1998, forty-two percent of Democrats counted themselves as Pro-life. Not-so-way back in the year of our lord, 2023, that number had emaciated to a paltry fifteen percent. My sarcastic tone aside, I find these numbers to be amazing. It shows progress. It shows growth. It shows a cultural shift toward compassion and dignity, rather than fear-mongering and bigotry. Not lost on me is the fact that, when these numbers were taken, it was mostly Boomers and older Gen Xers who were the primary recipients. Like, my mom was in her thirties and early forties during the Nineties. By the time that first poll as cited as taken, the immigrants one, she was well into her fifties but there had been a change in the overall makeup of pollsters. You see, in 2018, MY generation had entered the race! We, Millennials, were finally on the board and it changed absolutely f*cking everything!

I was born in 1984. Became a legal adult in 2002. In 2018, I was a healthy thirty-four years old. I was roughly the same age as my mom, back in the Nineties. I am old enough to have teenage kids, if I had any to begin with. I am old enough to be shaping the next generation of voters and idealists, which is an absolute nightmare for everyone who came before, because Millennials are basically the antithesis of “Traditional American Values.” Think about it, us older ones, the group born in the Eighties whom I like to call “The Oregon Trail Generation”, were all latchkey kids from single parent homes. We grew up with the internet, using AOL Messenger and random chatrooms at, like, f*cking six years old, to talk to people on the other side of the world. Our generation is intrinsically tied to the internet boom, rise of Youtube, and the death of almost every “traditional” form a of anything to date. We put LBGT+ rights at the forefront of our generational concerns, sowing the seeds of the Zoomer Trans revolt, and forced a reckoning about mental health, late stage capitalism, and general human rights. Hell, to take it further, religion started it’s great exodus with us, the birth rate fell off a cliff because none of us are having kids, and the advocacy for a four day work week has built into a full-throated demand, all on our watch. Millennials have basically ruined everything Middle America stands for, and I stand for that. Especially seeing where the kids coming after us are taking it.

Like, Millennials sparked the revolution, but these Zoomers and Alphas are going to stoke that sh*t into an inferno. Watching these brave ass f*cking kids, standing up to injustice, is outstanding. They all hate capitalism, absolutely know that the US government is full of sh*t, and they refuse to buy into the propaganda. I mean, obviously, there are concerning aspects of sh*t out there like this ridiculous Tradwife nonsense and the entire Manosphere, but even those are in decline. Each successive generation after mine has just gotten more Socialist and gay, and I am here for all of it. Less than three decades, man, and we went from most of the adults in the room, crying about fetus rights, to the VAST majority of us trying our goddamndest to enshrine a woman’s right to choose in every goddamn State constitution possible. But guess who’s standing in our way? That’s right, those Boomers! Even though they have lost so much of their presence in the adult electorate, they’re literally dying off, these assholes are packed to the gills in very level of government and won’t f*cking leave. Mitch McConnell personally knew Fred Flintstone and just no decided to step down from his GOP leadership role. Biden and Trump are Octogenarians, trying to run a country where they’re values haven’t been in the majority for at least a two decades. We have been trying to wrench the reins of power from these assholes born way back in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties for the better part of two decades, and they just f*cking refuse!  

A perfect example of this gap in perception is Israel. Personally, f*ck Israel and very Zionist who lives there. That’s been my sentiment since I learned about how that country came to be. But guess what? Through the power of the internet, and Tik Tok (why do you think the Feds are so hard-pressed to get rid of it), WAY more people feel the way I do than before. And guess how old those people are? Guess how old the people who blindly support an Israeli state, genocide and crimes against humanity be damned, are? The Democratic party hasn’t “shifted” left, we, as a society has. What the f*ck did you expect? We were rabid, feral, multi-cultural kids, from broken homes, unlocking doors and making grilled cheese for ourselves at six. By ten, we were raising our younger, Nineties Babies, siblings, because our one parent had to work stupid hours to pay for a mortgage trap. We took our objectively woke sensibilities, hone from years of public school integration, to the goddamn internet where we were exposed to the entire world of perspectives differing from ours. We are the last generation to play outside, and the first to Google facts for school reports. There hasn’t been a shift to the left, there has been a shift in understanding, intelligence, and knowledge. The shift is cultural, not political, and it’s just going to keep grow as we get older. No one wants to be Conservative anymore. We have to redefine those lines. The world is so much bigger, now, than it was back in the later 1900s. What a time to be alive!

[smokeybrandcompositions]

Exodus

I just read an article claiming that the biggest migration of people out of Christianity is happening in real time and find that hilarious. I’m on record as to being areligious but, as a youth, I was raised Christian. I think it was Southern Baptist but I can’t  remember. It’s been probably thirty-five years since I’ve set foot in a church for worship. I questioned my faith early on after seeing things in my church, which didn’t jive with the word I was being taught. I’m talking hungry people being turned away, even though we were having a potluck dinner at the time. Threats of corporal punishment if my five year old ass didn’t stop being a five year old during a three hour long sermon. I lost my faith when my grandma died. I prayed every day, pleaded with the higher powers that be, to take away my grandma’s cancer and, for a time, they obliged. A handful of months later, they found a tumor in her head mind she was dead within months. I was eleven or twelve and didn’t understand what metastasization was so, to me, that sh*t was a purposeful “act of god.” This omnipotent being, chose to give us false hope by taking away my grandma’s lung cancer, only to move it into her brain and take her from me. That sh*t went against everything I was taught growing up and it made me ask “Why.” I spent the next half decade of my life chasing that answer but I never found it. The closest I got was “God’s plan is not for us mere mortals to understand.” That’s bullsh*t. That non-answer forced me to look outside the Christian doctrines and I fared no better there. By the time I left high school, I was fully agnostic and leaning toward being outright atheist but my mom wanted me to give the church another shot. There was no way that was going to happened, I had already forsaken anything organized, but I opted to study more. Maybe I could find something in the word to care about, to build some semblance of spirituality around. I’m, like, seventeen now and, let me tell you, the next two years were a whirlwind of knowledge, surprise, and offense.

The first thing I learned about was the fact that apocryphal texts exist. I remember my grandma talking about the Dead Seas Scrolls; a bible older than any known at the time of discovery, which told a different version of the bible we use to worship currently. How is that possible? Isn’t he bible the word of god? Isn’t it all supposed to be the same thing? No! Christianity started out as a series of f*cking cults. All religions do. When one reaches critical mass, they become religion. That said, these cults, while still telling a similar story and preaching a similar gospel, are still different enough to become sects. They are Christian, yes, but not THE Christian, you know? Among these sects, was one called the Gnostics. They sought to quantify the word of Christ through observation of the natural world and common goddamn sense. The Dead Seas Scrolls are Gnostic Texts. These texts have a variety of different Books in their bible, a ton missing from them modern version we use today. Just a sprinkling of such includes: The book of Mary Magdalene. The Book of Judas. The Book of Thomas. The Book of Secret Paul. The Book of Bartholomew. These text paint a radically different view of Jesus and his life. The Book of Mary Magdalene posits that Mary of Magdalena was not a whore, but the daughter of the shipping magnate who controlled the port city of Magdalena. Not only was she basically a princess or socialite, she was the wife of Jesus, his first confidant, and person who bankrolled dude’s journey to spread his word. Far cry from a whore who washed Jesus’ feet, right? The Gospel of Judas basically says that Judas and Jesus were in cahoots about his crucifixion, that it a was necessary to shake his other followers out of their blind worship of the Evil God, because there was two. Or how about the book of Enoch, which basically said none of this matters because, at the end of times, everyone gets a pass. There are so many contradictory Gospels out there, it’s ridiculous. But they’re Gospels, right? They are the word of God, right? Then why haven’t I heard about them until now? Who said this Book was more true that that one? Well, I have an answer for that, too.

Once i learned about the Council of Nicaea, that was it for me. Christianity was bullsh*t from that point on. Whenever some overzealous church person gets after me about my indifference to their faith, I ask them if they know what the council of Nicaea is. They rarely do. Way back in the olden times, something like three hundred years after Jesus got crucified, Constantine the I and a bunch of bishops, got together and basically decided what books were canonized and what books were not. Basically, the king of the Holy Roman Empire, got a bunch of bishops together, and decided what Christianity was going to be going forward. They literally picked from hundreds of Gospels, chose the ones they liked the most (the ones which fit their agendas and made it easier for them to rule), and made that sh*t into the Holy Bible. That’s right, the bible as you know it, in all forms since AD 325, has been a straight of tool of propaganda. It was designed to placate, denigrate, and distract, the everyday man from the harshness of the world with promises of everlasting life, if you could sustain an entire, mortal lifetime of cruelty. I mean, the Epicurean Paradox, alone, was enough for me to basically write of a god, but this Nicaea business? How can you know about that and still be pious? How can you absolutely know, that your book of worship was curated by the social elite specifically to placate the serfs, and still act like it’s the word of your profound deity? At that point, everything is suspect. God doesn’t lie but men do and your bible, your direct tie to the word of god, was crafted by men. Men with vested interests in keep you subservient and docile. You are sheep to be kept, sheparded in flock buy Jesus or, rather, the Holy King, himself, Constantine. Followed by whoever else would have the audacity to co-op thump that bible with zealous aggression. I, personally, find that sh*t offensive and, apparently, so do a lot of people.

[smokeybrandcompositions]

Comeuppance

It feels like there has been a season of reckoning lately, like the pendulum has started to swing the other way in terms of old grievances and accountability. I’ve noticed it for a while, but it’s become more and more recognizable in the wild, since the whole Katt Williams/Club Shay Shay situation. If you’ve been living under a rock these past few weeks, Katt Williams basically went on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast and bombed out the entire comedy game. He sent shots to everyone; Kevin Heart, Steve Harvey, Tyler Perry, and Cedric the Entertainer. Hell, even Ludacris caught a stray and he was just existing. It was wild to see. The thing is, though, Katt has been saying the same goddamn thing for years. He’s been screaming about this same bullsh*t, for decades now. He’s been showing the same receipts for just as long. Obviously, there’s hyperbole in there, no one is reading three thousand books in a summer and I doubt mans can run a four flat at his age, but woven in all that blowhard bravado is real truth. Steve Harvey is a scumbag who stole Mark Curry’s entire career. Cedric the Entertainer did steal his joke. I don’t buy into the whole “Illuminati” sh*t but I wouldn’t discredit it all that much either. The Skull and Bones exist. So do the Free Masons. And black people are notorious for gate keeping It has long since been established that Oprah absolutely does not have the best interest of her people at heart and Tyler Perry is right up there with her. Mo’nique literally proved that with her Shay Shay expose. Like, she got Tyler Perry, on tape, admitting to and apologizing for, purposefully sabotaging her career. She also called out Kevin Hart for being a snake and Oprah for just being terrible to black people in general. Again, all sh*t she’s said before, for decades, but now, apparently, people are paying attention. They’re seeing the other side to the story and not just blindly following the narrative of the powerful. The entitlement is coming home to roost and it’s wild to see.

As a LAker fan, watching my team play the way they do is rough. I blame LeBron James. Wherever that dude goes, chemistry and coaching issues follow. Being “King James”, he has a certain amount of pull in the NBA, often exerting that leverage in very, personally benefiting, ways, the team be damned. We watched that sh*t in Cleveland the first time. Definitely saw it in Miami. More than witnessed it on the Cavs the second time around. Then it happened to my darling LAkers. LeBron has forced us to trade away strong assets to get AD, (which I’m not too upset about), has us mortgage our future with just SO many picks in an effort to build a “win now” team for him, handcuffed Pelinka into making terrible f*cking trades (Westbrick was a disaster for us), and cost us the best coach we’ve had since Jackson in Frank Vogel. All for a single Bubble championship. James has been doing this sh*t his entire career but, apparently, no longer. Pelinka made no moves at the deadline. He kept the assets we have. D.Lo is still a LAker and AR15 is developing into a proper leader. A few nights back, Bron and Ad sat out against, arguably, the best team in the league and thoroughly trounced Boston. More than that, these kids played ball with joy. They trusted each other. They were a team. That ball moved effortlessly to where it needed to go. They proved that we do not need James, or AD for that matter, and it’s thrown a wrench in James’ usually plans. His cryptic and childish tweeting fell on deaf ears. Rocking that Knicks towel moved no needles. Demanding that Darvin Ham be fired only got him a single game benching. Sh*t is not going the way it usually does and the “King” is hating that no one is recognizing his crown. I imagine James is feeling some kind of way because this is the first time in his career a franchise has properly told him “No.” We missed out on some solid trades and lost a ton of draft capital but, you know, better late than never. Speaking of…

Yo, Puff Daddy is going to f*cking prison! Never mind the stuff with Tupac and what not, though that sh*t is a whole situation prime for a deep dive, Cassie absolutely exposed dude! She got him on the hook for millions, forcing dude to sign over all the Masters he was holding to their respective artists, with a little bit of NDA incentive. Like, cats have been quietly suspect of Diddy for years. They were saying sh*t out loud, but not really pointing fingers, you know? I mean, 50 was but he built different. There was this air of invulnerability around Sean, one that has been three since the Nineties. Dude has been bulletproof since he “allegedly” had BIG killed because he was trying to get of Bad Boy. I mean, that was proven to be false, sort off. BIG was killed in retaliation for the Tupac hit; The one Diddy is being looked at for as we speak! But, again, that’s not what this is about. This is about how predatory this dude is, and has been, for years. Cats have been saying mans was weird. Rumors about him and Usher. Him and Fab. Up and coming artists, being raped in limos. Taking dudes “shopping.” Have all male orgies and sh*t. I’m over here asking what the f*ck Farnsworth know and why he fell of the face of the earth? Diddy is a devil in the music industry and Cassie has brought that violent asshole into the light. Cats are straight up telling on this man and sh*t is getting bad. We now know, for a fact, he is abusive. We now know, for a fact, he blew up Cudi’s car over Cassie. She has alluded to Diddy being responsible for Kim Porter’s death, among other, various, bodies. All things that have been whispered for years but never taken seriously. Now, after that multi-million dollar settlement, which is a low key admission of guilt, no one is afraid of the Big Bad Diddy. Everyone is coming to blow this man’s house down.

The big one for me, though, is how the entire international community, save the whitest countries in the union with the exceptions of Ireland, have completely turned on Israel. If you know me, you know I’m no fan of the Zionist State. I don’t see the difference between that, end European Imperialism. Neither should you, the sh*t goes hand in hand. It’s weird to me that everyone in “Western Civilization” (that’s code for white people), turn a blind eye to the atrocities these Ashkenazi assholes have been committing against Palestinians for decades. It’s like, just because the Holocaust happened to them, it’s fine if they do it to someone else. I’m not kidding about that, either. Germany has basically said as much. Now, them, the Germans, I can give a pass to for all of that Israel propaganda. They have a VERY deep seeded responsibility for a lot of what these assholes get away with, but everyone else? Like, Netanyahu has basically turned Israel into a Radical Jewish Terrorist State. and no one in the Western media cares. That’s not the narrative. Israel isn’t committing a genocide against the brown people who have lived on that land for centuries. I cannot tell you how frustrating it was to watch people defend Israel for committing actual war crimes and crimes against humanity, because if you didn’t, you were an anti-Semite. I mean, I could, because it happened to me, but lately? Not so much. Lately, cats are seeing Israel how I have seen them for most of my life. And the Hague agrees. The youngsters, agree. A lot more of my generation, agrees. Calls for a ceasefire have been ringing for months. People are heckling Biden, demanding action to stop this Zionist blood lust This is the first time, in my lifetime, that Israel isn’t getting away with their bullsh*t. People are doing things about it. Yemen is blockading supply shipments. Djibouti told the US to f*ck off when they wanted to install arms in their territory to bully Yemen into stopping their siege. Ireland has been acting a fool, calling out everyone in the EU who has backs the radical Israel regime, to their faces, even going so far as to disown Biden from his heritage. It’s nuts to see the chickens coming home to roost. There has been a shift in perception, sparks of rebelling against the narrative, flying across the globe. I am mad curious what’s going to happen in the future but, for the first time in a long time, I’m not so nihilistic about what comes next.

[smokeybrandcompositions]

John Wayne

Year in and year out, Conservatives use the fear of brown people to propel themselves into office. It’s always the same story; “They’re not sending their best”, “They’re taking our jobs”, “they’re crippling the welfare system”, and whatever else. I tune that sh*t out because I’m not an idiot. It’s an election year so the Right has been particularly aggressive with their brown people prejudice. They’re touting a “crisis” at the border, that five thousand people a day are illegally coming over and that’s just not true. It’s wildly inaccurate. In fact, I learned today that this sh*t comes in waves. I listened to a Texan tell me, one that lives in the State and sees this sh*t pretty regularly, that immigration rises during the holidays because, you guessed it, they cross to see family. Like anyone else during the holidays, these people come over, stay for a week, and then leave. The drop these cats are seeing in the January numbers are because the holidays are over, not because of Greg Abbott’s harsh stance on border security It’s just the natural flow of family exchange for Christmas. You catch a plane to see your aunt in Chicago, they swim across the Rio Grande to so the same. And just like you catch a return flight home, they wade across to the Mexico bank when they tire of all that extended family time. He also mentioned that there would be a spike in the spring. Why? Construction season. These people come over, get picked up as day laborers, then go home. They are temporary illegals. Listening to this man speak, and knowing what my friends abroad think of the US, it immediately dawned on me that most of these “illegals”, probably don’t even want to stay. They come over, work the fields, build a few houses, stay with family for a bit, then go back home. It’s no different than an Asian family sending money back to the home country or an exchange student sending back gifts. The way the Right wing media tells it, those five thousand a day, stay and mooch off our system. That they are parasites on the teat of Big Government. I would posited a guess that at least two-thirds of that five thousand, go back home after a month  or two to however long their particular labor seasons lasts. No one abroad wants to actually LIVE in the US. It’s f*cking horrible here, especially if you have an semblance of melanin in your skin.

I’m a huge black dude who is native to the US. I’ve lived here all my life and have seen, firsthand, how f*cking stupid it is here. I’ve watched as out “education” system gets dumber and more propagandized, as time has gone on. Hell, since I graduated high school twenty years ago, sh*t has gotten worse. Common Core Math is the dumbest sh*t I’ve ever seen in my life and the fact here is this ridiculous belief that Critical Race Theory is being taught to grade school kids, is insane. Bro, my niece’s history book refers to the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a f*cking cultural exchange. Do you have any idea how absurd that is? Red States across the nation are declining to teach anything about the Civil Rights Movement, outside of the whitewashed and sanitized version of MLK, because of white tears. More than that, our “education” system is constructed to actually educate. It’s not built to help teach you how to think critically or properly comprehend information. It’s there to make sure you are indoctrinated into the School-Work-Prison system we have here. There’s a reason you go to school for eight hours a day, have an hour of yard time, need to ask permission to use the rest room, and stay sequestered in social blocks most of the day. What’s the difference between desk, a cubicle, an a cell? They don’t teach you anything meaningful like taxes, self-defense, basic auto repair, or computer literacy. They did all of that when I was young, but not anymore. The first budgets to get slashed, every year, are Social Security and Education. Why? Because you don’t need to be intelligent to be a cog in the machine for the entirety of your life. They just move you from one institution to another, until you f*cking die. Our education system is designed to kill any semblance of free thinking and to encourage conformity. You are to take direction, never question it. It’s no wonder these people on the Right, who covet a Strong Man and value Cults of Personality over actual leaders, take to such egregious half-truths.

Admittedly, it never dawned on me to ask if all these illegals actually stayed and I tend to question everything. I just didn’t see it as that big of a problem because, in my experience, most illegals are hardworking, considerate, and go out of their way to avoid the system lest they be targeted. I’m from California. I know a bit about this immigration “crisis.” I live it, too, but, unlike Texas, I don’t care like that. I’m not laboring in that Cali heat during the summer. I did that when I was young. Use to work for a lawn care service in my youth. If someone else wants to do it, they can have it. That’s the funniest thing about all of this, the “illegals” WANT to do that sh*t while the “legals”, don’t. Florida is experiencing firsthand what happens when you turn hostile toward the people who do those quiet, unsung, jobs. Construction has come to a halt. Crops are rotting on the vine. Sure, DeSantis got his wish and bused out all the “illegals” or whatever, but not their State has reached an impasse. Oranges are literally rotting on the vine because all those white people who had a problem with the browns during harvest season, refuse to get out there an pick fruit. Hell, most are even willing to pay taxes out of there slave wages. They don’t mind contributing to a country which gave them more financial opportunity than the one they left. You have a temporary workforce who are willing to d this back-breaking job you outright refuse to do, in horrific seasonal conditions, and, instead of giving them an opportunity to do so in an acceptable, legal fashion, persecute them because they hopped a border? That doesn’t make any sense, especially when you take into account that the government, a bipartisan coalition, set up legislation to do just that. There was a plan on the books, a whole budget ready to be implemented to “secure our border”, and the Right sabotaged it because their Orange Hitler told them to. Because this immigration bogey man is all they have to run on. I don’t think Trump is getting re-elected, he’s alienated too many independents and women, but it’s nuts to see so many Republicans bend the knee, know it’s only in his best interests, not the country. That legislation on the border was the strongest sh*t put forth in decades and the Republicans, after negotiating so many concessions from the Democrats, effectively killed it. Boggles the goddamn mind, man. And that brings me to my whole point: Stupid people are being tricked by this blatant propaganda.

A guy I know was radicalized when he moved to Idaho, one of the Reddest, Whitest, most Religious States in the union. They are known as the potato capital in the Union so, guess what the second highest demographic there is? Before, this dude was absolutely in love with a Mexican woman. She was his unicorn. After that move, and after his second wife cheated on him (just like his first), he became this Far Right, conspiracy believing, Fox News watching, Arm Chair Patriot who believes in his Country, His military, and his God. Dude is also a prime example of the cog pour education system kicks out. He was a C/D student, which speaks to his lack of comprehension but ability to make orders, who graduated High School by the seat of his pants and opted to join the military, another institution where you are literally conditioned to take order. He told me that he loved the military life specifically FOR that. He didn’t like to think and found it easier to take orders. This is a man who had to ask his father for advice at every major life choice, a person who had to have his mother or wife, but up his steak because he refused to eat any food off the bone. Dude refused to cash his Pandemic check because he didn’t need no handouts, or whatever, even though that check was basically the government giving him back his own money. Just stupid sh*t born of immaturity and a complete lack of comprehension, just how our education system raised him up to be. This dude doesn’t have the ability to think for himself, he can’t dive deep into a subject because he was never taught patience or given the tools to actually research properly. He blindly believes whatever strong, male, energy is currently in his immediate space and defers, like a puppy, to it. His masculinity is tied to someone else’s and it’s jarring to see. He fetishizes black bodies, basketball is his favorite sport, but he doesn’t value black lives. We had a NBA Bubble long exchange about the civil unrest after George Floyd’s death and he took the cliche, milquetoast, Conservative stance of, “I believe they are right to be angry but riots are bad and don’t work because they alienate people from your message.” Nah, they alienate white people from the message because seeing a bunch of black people out in force, terrifies them. Riots work. It’s why there are Gay Rights. It’s literally how this country started. Basically this dude I know, is the exact face of the modern Republican proletariat and that goes a LONG way to explain why some asshole like Trump can strangle the entire GOP to near death, in service to his own ego.

The bulk of the Republican voter base are like the dude I know. They’re idiots. It’s not their fault, they were trained to be that way. Sh*t started early, in the pulpits of church, carried over through school, perpetuated once they entered the work force or military, and solidified once they entered middle age. These people are sheep, bred to prop up the elites. They just accept whatever Fox News or Donald Trump spoon feeds them, because they’ve been doing that their entire lives. They want the Strong Man. They need the orders. They can’t function without them. Plus, all these brown people are coming over here and breeding out their pure, white, blood. Poisoning the gene pool and sh*t. They can roll my burritos, but I’ll be damned if they roll in the hay with my daughter. Even though it takes two to tango. That doesn’t matter because Fentanyl is flooding over the border, never mind that the opioid crisis was engineered by Big Pharma and the over prescription of Xanax. The “Crisis” at he border is something only Trump can solve, even though Biden had his pen ready to sing that bi-partisan plan which the Right killed. They even released it to the public so they could see for themselves where that loot was going but that didn’t matter. The Sheeple didn’t believe anything the Swamp was trying to slide by them, because their kowtowing leaders, those weak ass Strong Men they crave, told them not to. These people don’t have the capacity to think for themselves and the ones who do, use that ability to grift. People like Ben Shapiro aren’t stupid. They know what they say is incendiary and ridiculous but he gets paid to say that dumb sh*t, because it resonates with dumb people. Tucker Carlson is a bigot who gave Putin time on his show, and exposure to his gullible ass audience, so that the Strongest Man would push his absurd, revisionist, history directly to the most susceptible idiots in the idiot bunch. And they ate that sh*t up. Carlson is joke and has done irreparable damage to this country with that stunt but only people who understand consequence, individuals who fight for the right to think for themselves, understand that. It’s the same reason these people are so easily spooked by the phantom brown boogeyman every election year. They don’t want to read the legislation and are too idiotic to complacent to ask why? They feel safe in the arms of the Strong Man, even as said Man slowly closes his grip, choking them to death with that strength they long for.

[smokeybrandcompositions]

Jonestown

My kid brother posted this thing on Facebook asking what feels like a cult but isn’t seen as one. There were a lot of your common responses; Scientology, Herbalife, Christianity (which is a cult because all religions are, technically, cults), but my response was Republicans. There is this palpable, disconnected, zeal shared by every Republican in office right now that can only be described as cult like. Even the f*cking moderates are out of their minds and I cannot move past the fact they’ve effectively, as a party, stalled out the entire Government with all the bullsh*t going on in the House right now. It is absolutely staggering to me how inept the Right is, and how those who claim the GOP are just fine with that, as long as the Left doesn’t do anything, too. It’s like their whole platform is just playing spoiler for anything Democrats want and that’s it. That’s the agenda. Never mind doing right by the people. Never mind supporting their constitute. None of that matters in the face of sabotaging anything someone who even slightly looks Left, from trying to get legislation passed. The Republican party has devolved into a cult of dangerously Christian trolls. A friend of mine disagreed. He considers MAGA a cult, but not Republicans as a whole. His reasoning is that there are still “good” Republicans out. I had to sit on that for a while and think about it before responding. I came to the conclusion that we, as a people, conflate Republican and Conservative too freely and that distinction needs to be made in this case.

Now, MAGA is a full-on cult. That’s how Fascism is a thing. They NEED a cult of personality for the dictator to take power. Every Republican in office right now, has hitched their wagon to said would-be-Dictator, in order to drag along their political fortune in his wake. Donald Trump wants to be President for Life and has been saying as much for the last four years, ever since he got booted from office. This man looks up to Strongmen and wants that kind of power. He’s literally said he would be a dictator “for the first day” if re-elected and has basically said he’s immune to prosecution if crimes were committed during his presidency, up to murder or selling State secrets. This is Putin’s game plan. This is Kim-Jong levels of barbarism. This is the sh*t Netenyahu is doing in Israel to both Palestinians AND his own people who dare speak out against him. This is the type of iron clad power Trump wants and you have to be absolutely transfixed by that, in order to advocate for it. These MAGA assholes actively committed treason on this man’s word and attempted an insurrection. If that’s not a cult, I don’t know what is. MAGA is definitely a cult and they are leading the entire Republican party by the nose. Those who speak out, who actively call out what MAGA is even when staunchly denying they are a part of it, are effectively assassinated politically. It happened to Liz Cheney. It’s probably going to happen to Chris Christie. It’s happening in real time to Kevin McCarthy. It would have happened to Mitt Romney if he hadn’t decided to retire. The people who lift their heads out of the sand about this dangerous rhetoric, are targeted and then decapitated by the overwhelming influence MAGA has on the entire Party and that, to me, is why there are no “good” Republicans. They move, lock step, with whatever benefits Trump, not the Nation, and it’s absurd. If you align yourself with this party and do not speak out against its bullsh*t, then you are still part of the problem. It’s not just a MAGA issue, it’s a Republican issue, which is why I make that distinction because there are an absolute f*ck ton of Conservative minded individuals who speak out against this sh*t pretty regularly.

Being a Conservative means living by those values. Taking them to heart but also understanding that life is about growth. You can look back, but understand that we, as a people, are constantly moving forward. You have to have a certain amount of decency to be a Conservative, in my estimation. It’s the difference between BEING a good Christian and performatively “being” a “good Christian.” Something like standing in front of a church for a photo op, while holding the bible upside down or locking your congregation out of your megachurch which used to be a whole ass basketball arena, during one of the worst hurricanes in decades, as opposed to, you know, not doing that stuff. I imagine there has to be some order of tolerance and properly living by those tenants in the bible. You know, love that neighbor, turn the other cheek, all that sh*t. Basically just treat people with respect and tolerance. Know that your values are yours , alone, and shouldn’t be unilaterally forced upon anyone else. There is merit in looking back to a simpler time. I wholeheartedly believe it is necessary for Conservatives to exists out in the wild as their nostalgic often tempers the rush most Progressives have toward the future. They need each other to find a genuinely comfortable pace for our evolution as a society. Without that counterbalance, Progressives would have us run right off a cliff in the name of progress. We need both to be reasonable and dynamic in the human experience. Just to be crystal clear, everything I said pertains to the international political scale, not the one here in the US and that’s the problem.

Everything here in the States has shifted sharply to the Right. It feels like, since Kennedy’s head got Pollock’d, everything has just been out of step with the rest of the world. People like Biden and Obama would be considered Republican, firmly on the Right, anywhere else in the world but here? Here in the US where being progressive and just generally a decent human being is frowned upon, those cats are touted as true Liberals. People like AOC and The Squad would be considered moderate Progressives anywhere else but, according to their absolutely cartoonish adversaries across the aisle, they are “Radical” and “communists”. There is a difference between wanting Democratic Socialism and being a straight up Commie. It’s in that lack of nuance where so much miscommunication has bred. That mire of ideologues and ideology is why there are so many problems here. When you stand by and let a crazy person with a bad tan basically tell you he’s running to be El Presidente for Life, as a means to avoid doing time for felonies he openly admits to committing, who has preached retribution for anyone who has opposed him since being kicked out of the big chair, how can you not be in a cult? How can you not have drank that Kool-Aid? Even tacitly endorsing this f*ckery gives it life. Passing the buck in terms of accountability, Mitch McConnell, is siding with a history rife with violence and bloodshed. The Republican party is a cult in everything but name and they got there by allowing the actual zealots to take over.

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Factual Fiction

Cats want to boycott season five of Stranger things because Noah Schnapp is pro-Israel and i kind of find that excessive. Schnapp is a New York Jew who works in Hollywood. I'm generalizing here, of course, but since this sh*t has started, I'm seeing more and more of this specific type of Jew, screaming antisemitism when confronted with anti-Zionism. Debra Messing is another one. Steven Spielberg, too. I mean, he lived in New Jersey but that's close enough, i think. The issue here is that these very much affluent individuals, hyper focus on the idea of Israel and not what the Israeli government has been doing for seventy years. Hell, a lot of them have come out and said that everything Israel is doing in Gaza, is absolutely justified because of the brutality of that November 7th attack, literally ignoring the fact that, in order to even create the open air prison that is modern Gaza, they basically Kristallnacht'd the entire population already living there. Couldn't Hamas use the same logic to justify their attack on the 7th?

It's fine to support what you perceive to be your homeland, however problematic it's creation is, but i find it intellectually dishonest to so one-sidedly support what is basically a racial cleansing at this point. My personal opinion of the Israeli state aside, i genuinely believe it has no right to exist in it's current form, No one, in good conscious who's not a complete zealot, can see the devastation going on during this massacre and honestly believe it's justified. Like, Israel just bombed a refugee camp. They outright murdered three surrendering Jewish hostages, gunned them down in cold blood as one was even waving the flag of surrender, because they thought they were Gazans. They shut of water to the occupied territory at the very start of this holocaust, targeted reporters with lethal effect to keep the news from getting out, and attacked hospitals under the false guise of them being Hamas strongholds: All of which are War crimes, all of which are just the tip off the iceberg in terms of what is going on out there. The personal stories of survivors is more than harrowing but Steven Spielberg wants to propagandize this sh*t and make it seem like all the brown people are at fault. And that's kind of my point.

A few years back, i watched this Vice documentary about how Israel basically started seizing Palestinian property, i believe in the West Bank, illegally expanding their territory and evicting Palestinian residents from their ancestral homes. I watched a Palestinian family plead with this New York Jew, who decided to move to Israel because they offered him a house for free basically. Their house. Generations of Palestinians lived in that house but, because Israel is an occupying force, backed by the strongest military in the world, they just keep committing atrocities like it's nothing. Dude as, like, "This is my house because this is my land because my god said so." You can commit horrors when your god says it's okay. And this is an American Jew. Imagine what actual Israelis think of Palestinians after living in that entitled and propagandized environment their entire lives?

The people waging this war don't see Palestinians as human. They've said as much. Now, i don't know if it's just racism or if that bigotry is tied up in their religious bullsh*t, but i do know that every Jew here in the States, are coming at this from a "chosen Land" perspective first, and then maybe a "I hate darkies" perspective second. Again, when your version of the one god says it's fine, you have a blank check to inflict horrors, something the Israelis have been doing since they crashed the walls of Jericho. That's right, the Israel from antiquity, started with a military siege. God basically "gifted" them a land with a whole ass fortified city on it. You know what that's called? Theft. They stole that land, just like Britain did for them centuries later. They're proud of that sh*t. It's the origin of their entire culture as a solidified peoples. And it started with a brutal siege and occupation of a land which belonged to an entirely different people. Sounds familiar, right?

I might be losing the plot here but this sh*t chaffs my ass. The state of Israel is as terrible as Hamas, which is as terrible as any other terrorist organization; The difference being Israel created Hamas by disregarding the terms of their country's genesis and immediately began persecuting their neighbors in the name of their version of god. That same reason is why so many prominent Jewish people, here, in the US, are so fervently and blindly, supporting Israel. it's fine that these assholes are murdering babies and bombing Gazan historic sites because Hamas is bad. These people experienced a single day of the same treatment they've given Gazans for decades, have gone full mask-off with their genocidal intent, with the full backing of US Jews, and that sh*t is wild to me. Noah Schnapp's perspective is not isolated. You see it throughout most mainstream media. The dissonance between the reality happening on the ground in Gaza, and what these people believe, is, at best, negligent and at worst, calculated.

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Spin

The conquest of Jericho is the story of the Jews seizing the Canaanite city of Jericho, basically stealing their land and claiming it as their own, because their God said so. It's basically the climax to Exodus. Moses leads the Jews out of Egypt, climbs a mountain to get the base rules for Judaism, comes down to see his people spanking and worshiping cows, God makes them wander the desert long enough to kill off two generations, finally letting these asshole enter the"promised land." Not Moses, though. He die after seeing it from a distance. Anyway, there were people already there and the Jews just decoded to siege their sh*t and take it. Guess where Canaan was located? F*cking Palestine. Even in antiquity, Palestine was there before Israel. It literally existed, as a while country, with a whole ass culture, centuries before the Jews stumbled out of the desert, blood thirsty and crazy, claiming the first civilized city as their own. That's THEIR story! That's what they use to stake their claim on the land. God sent them there to conquer the Canaanites and steal their sh*t. Which they did. So turnabout is fair play, yeah? I imagine the non Arab Palestinians, the ones descended from the people of Canaan, would have even more of a stake that the Israelis considering how they were there first. In antiquity. Minding their own business. Doing their own thing. Until them trumpets started trumpeting and them walls came down. Bro, when you take into account the entire history of this absurd situation, there is no way someone with sense, not looking at this through a religiously biased lens, can condone anything about the state of Israel. Like, I'm not antisemitism, I don't hate the Jewish people, but it's f*ck Zionist Israel, all day. And it's f*ck anybody who tries to tell me otherwise, especially when their argument starts with something about YHWH said, and ends with Jewish victmhood.

It's transparently hilarious how much hypocrisy cats in power are spewing over Israel's "right to defend itself", like that shouldn't extend to those trapped in Gaza, to the Palestinian people as a whole. To be clear, I don't condone the brutality shown by Hamas, BUT, as a direct descendant of an enslaved people, I definitely get it. After decades of brutality, there is no more nuance. Israel is my enemy, even if there are Israelis who sympathize. Ask any Black person on the street and, more often than not, they'll tell you f*ck the police. Why? Because there were centuries of brutality thrust upon us by them. And I do mean centuries. The modern Sheriff system in the US started out as a means to recapture runaway slaves. That's historical fact. Doesn't mean tall cops are bad but enough of them are. The history dictates they are. Imagine what a Gazan feels after twenty years of that blockade? Two decades of apartheid. Two decades of terror. Two decades of shelling, overt military provocation, and kidnappings. You think Hamas started in a vacuum, that the cruelty and inhumanity they exhibited was just to terrorize innocent Israelis? Nah, that is decades, near a century's worth, of generational anger toward a "country" that has been actively trying to eradicate them. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that, even before this country was called Palestine, way back when it was the land of Canaan, the Jews occupied it. None of that matters because it's always the oppressed who get villainized when they actually treat their oppressor in the same way. How many Palestinian bodies has Israel tallied since the Sixties? Since the blockade went up? How much Palestinian blood was shed as the Israeli State, illegally annexed more and more land from those people. But let's all pearl clutch and pretend Hamas perpetrated war crimes unprovoked, that Israel is the victim on this.

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Do Not Pass Go

This stuff with the budget and government shutdown is staggering to me. Like, as a cat on the outside looking in, our legislatures look like buffoons, specifically the GOP. Say what you will about the Dems, when they had control, they actually got sh*t done. Not a whole lot, mostly because of GOP holdouts and DINOS like Sinema, but enough to make the US respectable again. The second the Republicans got a hold of the House, I knew that was going to end. It’s nuts to me that more people don’t see through their culture war bullsh*t to the very glaring truth the GOP has no idea how to actually govern. These mother*ckers have no plans and only look out for their own interests. These dick-cheese-on-crackers will burn everything down kowtowing to a would-be-president-for-life, with a crumbling real estate “empire” and a whole ass RICO case, just to get on the ticket with him. In a presidential race he will very likely lose! All for naught! White Supremacist Fascists aside, the real problem here (and, yes, I understand the staggering weight what I just said and don’t take it’s dismissal lightly) falls on the weakest f*cking House Speaker in the history of the United States of America: Kevin McCarthy. Bro, this dude is a spineless clown!

Like, the Speakership was SO important to him, that he made a poisoned deal with what amounts to Neo-Nazis in our government. They have the power to oust him from his position, which is why we are on the brink of yet another, GOP instigated, government shutdown. This will be the second since Drumpf had the big chair. It’s absolutely insane to see. This man is selling out the American People, because Matt Gaetz got on TV and basically said “Do it or else.” I cannot even begin to understand how flaccid Kevin McCarthy's dick is. Like, his wife’s vagine must be as dry as Ben Shapiro’s missus because being that goddamn soft, to CHOOSE to be that goddamn vulnerable, is insane to me. The f*cking Senate has even got a stop-gap measure locked and loaded, one built on bipartisan cooperation, ready to go but McPussy won’t even bring it to the floor because the crazies who hold his leash, won’t allow him to. Politics aside, strictly looking at this as a person who lives in this country and has sense, why the f*ck are you negotiating with what amounts to domestic terrorists?  You’re gonna lose your job, dude, wither way. It’s going to come from a vote on the House floor or a vote at the polls. Either way, McCarthy is f*cked, Almost as f*cked as he’s leaving the country by playing politics with radical insurgents, instead of ratifying a bill for the people.

[smokeybrandcompositions]

Family Matters

I always find the generational gap between perspective to be interesting. Like, my extended family is having a birthday party for one of my mom's aunts and a celebration of life for one who passed this year. She's very adamant that i participate but i don't see the point. A little context, my mom has these awesome memories of her time hanging out with her family. She has stories for days about her cousins and aunts and everyone. That's fine. I do not. I did, early on, but after my grandma died, it's like all of those relationships went with her to the grave. My grandma died when i was around twelve years old. I turn thirty-nine tomorrow. I've not had a relationship with these people (or the ones my age, to be honest) for two and a half decades. I've lived an entire life away from these people so, when they have get-togethers like this, I'm just there. For my mom, this is a big deal. It's family. It's all of those memories she has, given form. For me, it's basically a bunch of people I've seen a handful of times since my grandma died. I just don't care.

My mom subscribes to the Boomer notion that you can't choose your family. Blood is thicker than water and all that. I do not. I learned much later in life that the full quote is "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." Basically, the actual saying means that you choose your family, that those bonds aren't tied by relation. Why would i want to spend time with people who basically threw my entire family away the second my grandma passed away? To be clear, this isn't me holding a grudge. I wasn't hurt that they stopped coming around or calling. Hell, i didn't even notice until one of my kid brother's pointed it out when i was well into adulthood. Like, i don't have a desire to stick to these people for leaving me out to dry or whatever. I sincerely don't care. I have my tribe. I've had my tribe for decades now at this point. I'd choose any of them over time with my extended family, any day of the week. And, in absence of one of mu chosen, i default to me.

I have very limited time for myself. I work a regular nine to five, but really i start at five so it's more a five to five. Get off work and then i take care of my mom. She's in bad shape so i tend to do the heavy lifting for her. Take out the garbage, walk her dog (which i do in the morning before i go to work, too), clean the kitchen, and whatever else she needs. I generally knock out by about nine or ten. I have around four hours to myself when i get home, and even then, I'm still kind of at the mercy of my ma's beckon call. Saturdays, i tend to sleep in because, of course, but those are the days where i have to run her errands. My ma refuses to drive because she's scary so that falls on me. Generally, from ten to twelve on a Saturday, I'm doing sh*t for her. Thems is part-time job hours, bro. Afterward, I'm still on the hook for all the sh*t she needs me to do during the week after work, too. Sunday is the day i reserve for myself, as much as possible but, even then, a third of it it is filled with my chores. Grocery shopping, cleaning, clothes washing, and i still have to walk her dog twice a day. I don't begrudge my ma for this at all. She's old and needs the help. That's fine. This is just context for why i don't want to do "more" than i have to do. Sh*t eats into my "Me" time.

I write. I draw. I game. Hell, sometimes i just want to throw my Spotify on shuffle and vibe. What's that sh*t called? Self care? There is value in that for me. Much more so than spending time with people I've seen less than my best friend, and he's been dead for four years. That's not hyperbole at all either. My best friend passed away in 2019. I'd known him since the eighth grade so, what is that? 1998? We had been in each others' lives for twenty years. I talked to that man multiple times a week, even when i moved to Arizona. Even when he got married and disappeared for a year. Even when i moved to Houston, we stayed in touch. We hung out for a few hours two weeks before he passed. He changed my brakes, we drank a carton of Newman's Own Lemonade. We blasted Du Hast at three in the morning. It's one of my happiest memories and the last one we shared. I don't have one like that for any of the people I'm expected to hang out with today. None of them. But, for some reason, in my mom's eyes, the non existent relationship i have with them, should carry the same weight as the one i had with my best friend, just because "family."

That sh*t doesn't make any sense to me. It feels like her definition of family is basically just obligation and i disagree. I don't owe anyone, anything, ever, and i don't think setting that boundary is such a terrible thing.

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Bye Bye Bye

Lately, i find myself singing along to Nsync and Britney Spears songs. It's nuts because i hated them when i was a kid but, as a got older, i actually started liking them. Unironically, i f*cking love Bye Bye Bye. Now. Back then? I found it loathsome. Objectively, all of these songs are terrible. Terrible lyrics. Questionable vocals. Weird harmonies. Dope ass production, though. Consciously, i know that these songs are the equivalent to brain-dead blockbusters designed to appeal to the loins rather than the heart. That said, every time I've ever heard It's Gonna Be Me as an adult, i find myself singing right along. Why? I don't think i love the songs, themselves. Is til think they're all bunk. I just think I've aged enough to see them for what they are: Harness pop nonsense. More than that, they are relics of my youth and my generation, the Millennials (Specifically by little sub-generation, the Xennials), are a generation defined by nostalgia. Millennials are cats born from the early Eighties into the mid-Nineties. We grew up during the height of US property. We watched the Internet become a thing. We f*cking remember Netscape and Friendster. We went from vinyl, to cassette, to CD, to MP3, to f*cking Spotify. Bro, cell phones had battery packs you wore like a purse when i was young.

We saw the very best of what the world had to offer as children and then the second we were adults, the second we had the opportunity to harvest our share of that juicy ass fruit, the world collapsed around our ears. It is in that collective trauma in which we we stand alone. Zoomers grew up in this hell, the memory of better times is like a ghost to them. Alphas have no idea what it was like to, you know, exists in a world that isn't on fire. Millennials watched the collapse. The slow motion car crash of the "American Dream" happened right before our eyes. We were all casualties by the time we could steer the goddamn ship and that's why i like Nsync now. It's why i own every goddamn Playstation and keep Mr. Brightside on repeat. Well, not so much Mr. Brightside. That sh*t is just a straight up classic which has withstood the test of time. It is why i dropped six hundred dollars on a pair of Playoff XIIs, though. Same reason i own two, identical, Starscream action figures and am putting serious thought to getting that new MP Optimus Prime. I don't like Nsync because the music is good or my tastes have softened. I like Nsync because it's the soundtrack to my childhood, particular my my Junior High/High School years. This isn't a situation where i peaked in high school and yearn for those lost days like Hank Hill or someone equally as pathetic.

No, this is me, listening to a record, which reminds me of a time before rampant stupidity took over the world. 9/11 occurred a week after i started eleventh grade and it's been downhill ever sense. By the time i turned eighteen, we were a the start of a war which would last twenty f*cking years and cause more than one recession. I like Nsync because it reminds me of a time before all of that happened. It reminds me of a time where there was still hope for the future, where i still bought into the myth of "hard work pays off." I like Nsync because their music reminds me of a time where the future was still unwritten, not this quagmire of willful ignorance, anti-intellectualism, blatant corruption, and wholesale stupidity. I like Nsync because I'm nostalgic for the promise of a world which was stolen from me; A world that I know, first hand, could have been because I grew up during a time where those seeds were being planted. The seeds for my future never sprouted. I never got to sip that sweet nectar of progress and prosperity. What I got, after seeing the potential just over the horizon of adulthood, was a capitalist dystopia and the dumbest apocalypse imaginable. I like Nsync because I am nostalgic for a world where my biggest problem was irrationally hating a boy band lead by a Mousketeer with Top Ramen for hair, which made harmless, superficial, brainless, music. But, also, Bye Bye Bye is a banger.

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Sinking Ship

Yo, another one bites the dust! F*cking parts guy's last day was today! Didn't even know that sh*t. Bro didn't say bye or anything, just slid out at three. Fart in the wind type sh*t. Bro, I've been here four months. Four. Months. In that time, I've seen one retirement and four resignations, and that's not counting the other tech who's getting wooed by another shop, at a ten dollar an hour bump! How long before he makes that move?

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Brand Recognition

I heard somewhere yesterday that people don't vote for individuals who change their lives, they vote for brands. Like, you don't vote for the policies of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but you do vote for AOC because she plays Mario Kart over stream. Now, for me, i don't function that way. I need to know things. I need to make informed opinions. It's a facet of my hyper-vigilance. I know AOC's politics. I know what she stands for. I am assured in my decision to support her agenda. It's the same with why i do not support Trump and, by extension, the Republican party and Conservative ideals as a whole. Conservatives are in the business of now-thinly-veiled Fascism and the vast majority of their supporters are eating that sh*t up. Why? What happened to the Republican Party? I mean, Trump happened but why continue following this man who has been indicted four goddamn times? Who has the Feds all in his sh*t? Who has a RICO case going on in Georgia, built on the fact he's on tape bargaining for voter fraud? Then it hits me: They're not voting for Trump the man, they're voting for Trump the brand. If you do any amount of Google-fu, that cursory search will reveal how goddamn bad Trump is at business. From being a straight up slum lord in the Eighties, to failing upward again and again at real estate during the Nineties, to becoming a master at marketing during the Aughts. You can't tell me that a man who suggests dropping an atomic bomb in the heart of a hurricane to counter its spin, should have his finger on that button. You can't seriously say to me that someone who believes they "fell in love" with the brutal dictator of North Korea, should ever sit in the big chair of the US ever again. This motherf*cker printed off two trillion dollars in two months, trying to "fix" the economy, inflation be damned! Just print more money was his solution to the country not having enough money, basic economic theory need not apply. Never mind the rapes. Never mind the abortions. Never mind the adultery. Never mind the hypocrisy. The things i cited above are things he actually DID and you still vote for this man? Because you're not voting for the man, you're voting for the brand. Donald trump is a master of PR. He's been on TV. Dude was a celebrity long before he was anything political. The money he actually made in an honest days work, not by shorting the Feds on taxes for thirty years or making borderline illegal deals with the Saudis, was his time on The Apprentice. People ate that sh*t up. Why do you think 45 is so obsessed with ratings? Because The Apprentice is where the Trump Brand took root. The vast majority of the Tens, Trump licensed his name to everything he could and collected a check on it. He wasn't some miraculous businessman who was outside the sphere of Washington influence. He was a scuzzy slime lord who had reality TV clout and a weirdly bulletproof confidence that he could get away with anything. Dumb people flock to that. Dumb people think that's strength. Dumb people buy into that brand. Republicans are a cult of personality. They vote for an in image. They vote for a Brand. They vote for Trump, not Trump, and when you look at it from that perspective, of course they do.